Nissan ponders Pré-like cordless charging for e-cars

Leccy Tech Along with its plans to sell a leccy car to World+Dog, Nissan now reckons it has cracked the problem of wireless e-car charging.

Well, almost.

According to reports, Nissan has lashed up an electromagnetic inductive charging system in a prototype of the new e-car it plans to unveil later this year.

Sadly, Nissan is keeping tight-lipped about the technical capabilities of the system so we have no idea how long the system takes to charge a car's battery pack or how it gets the induction coils in the charger and those in the car close enough together to get jiggy.

Beyond planting inductive chargers in parking bays, Nissan is apparently also dreaming of putting them in road surfaces for a fully fledged charge-as-you-drive experience.

Before we all get too excited, Nissan admitted it doesn't yet know how expensive such a system would be, how fast it could charge the batteries of cars using the leccy lane, or how physically long a charge lane would have to be to make the idea technically or commercially viable.

In other words, these are all just scientifically feasible (sort of) scribbles on the back of an envelope at the moment. Perhaps London's 150 miles of bus lanes could be used as a proving ground? ®